'Independent' report on dredging now complete

Another phenomenon I had noted that has crept into modern politics was summed up by some Republican supporters I saw on a new story at the time of the 2020 US election in Pennslyvania. They were in the street and arguing with Democrats, whenever the Democrats tried to discuss something, the Republicans just drown them out with words like blar, blar, blar and waving a US flag. It did concern me because it felt the US was going down the Germany 1933 route. It also produced a replicated reaction in Democrats. Entrenchment seemed 100% complete in that example. I don't think it quite as bad in the UK, but its creeping in particularly the labelling of them and us.
 
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/defra-wont-dredge-up-truth-about-toxic-seas-fzc38sqd5

Comment piece in The Times, 23.01.23:

Don’t believe the spin. Friday’s headlines claimed there was no evidence that toxic man-made chemicals might be implicated in the unprecedented mass marine deaths along the northeast coast in 2021. Instead the government’s independent expert panel concluded there was a plausible natural cause. True, this was a completely different natural cause from that which the government originally settled on and vigorously defended until last week, but no matter. One natural cause was as good as another. If industrial poisons were not involved, the coast was now clear for the mass digging and dredging of Rishi Sunak’s pet political project, the freeports in Teesside and round the country, to go ahead without restriction.

I wish I could believe it. The evidence isn’t there. This is the second government inquiry into the mass die-offs, and on both occasions there has been a troubling failure to look deeply into theories that are politically inconvenient.


The government was forced into a second inquiry only because its first conclusion was implausible. Last spring Defra said the sudden near-extinction of crabs and lobster along 30 miles of coast by the Tees, Britain’s most polluted river, was probably caused by natural algal blooms, although blooms had never caused these particular effects. Defra did not explore why the crabs died, in convulsions, with a phenomenally high level of pyridine, a common toxic chemical, in their bodies.
Defra refused to enquire further when local fishermen begged it to. The fishermen were told to find their own evidence, so they commissioned university scientists whose research suggested toxic chemicals dislodged by intense dredging could be the cause. In November the environment select committee ordered Defra to create an independent expert panel to evaluate the conflicting theories in “an open and collaborative way” to ensure public confidence.
It is this panel that reported on Friday. It is remarkable, the power of labels. An “independent expert panel” sounds soothingly august and trustworthy. Their conclusions were reported as definitive. Yet this panel did not merit its name. Its members were appointed by Defra’s chief scientific officer and overseen by him. It operated in private, met in private, did no original research and depended on Defra to supply the outside scientists’ work. It met only three times as a group, describing its operation as “a desk exercise”. Its membership was unbalanced — two members have worked for British ports and three had funding from Defra, but there were no fishermen.

Nor was it collaborative. The panel did not speak to, meet or ask any questions of the outside scientists challenging Defra. This indefensible approach has affected its conclusions and credibility. The panel dismissed Defra’s original explanation. Their rejection of the algal bloom theory is based on well-known science, carefully explained. Their rejection of the toxic chemicals theory is based, though, on “a fundamental misunderstanding and misrepresentation of our data”, according to the marine biologist who developed it.
Gary Caldwell of Newcastle University is frustrated because a single session in front of the panel, a hearing he never had, would have explained his findings. The report dismisses pyridine poisoning because the chemical wasn’t found in recent water sampling, but it fails to grasp a key element of his research: pyridine is uniquely toxic to crustaceans even in minute quantities, and clings to grains of sediment even when it is undetectable in water. Caldwell has found pyridine in shallow sediment samples in the Tees, indicating there may be large quantities below. If pyridine is, as he theorises, being released in dredged sediment and carried out to sea, then crustaceans would have been roiled along in an underground river of silt, poisoned and unable to escape. It could explain how and where the crustaceans died.

Having rejected both these explanations the panel offered a third: a novel pathogen might have caused the convulsions and mass deaths. It is an aliens-ate-my-homework explanation. It may prove to be true. So far there is no evidence whatsoever that it is. Defra’s scientists tested for novel disease and found none.

The irony is that nobody would be happier than Caldwell and the university scientists to have his theory ruled out — “then we could get back to our lives and careers” — but not because it has been garbled, or ignored. There is a credible and definitive way to either support or disprove the pyridine thesis, but the government has declined to take it, which leaves one wondering why.

Caldwell has been asking for months for permission to check for buried pyridine and other noxious legacies of the Tees’s industrial past, by taking deep sediment samples at the dredge and digging sites, and sending them to independent laboratories. If the samples contained no pyridine the theory would collapse. The process would be fast: a week to sample, three for results.
He cannot get that permission. Teesworks, the company digging out old polluted sites in the biggest brownfield development in Europe, have refused to let him map what they are excavating and releasing. The port and river authorities don’t reply. Defra say they don’t do sampling. This sums up the government’s appallingly blinkered approach to what we are pouring into our seas: let’s not examine too closely what we’re doing; if we don’t map and monitor, we don’t have to acknowledge the connection between it and the deaths and deformities round our coasts.

The acute danger here is that the panel’s report is already being taken by exultant freeport supporters as a licence to dig and dredge with abandon, as before. It shouldn’t be. On its way to exonerating specific chemicals from direct responsibility for the die-offs, the report lists in petrifying detail all the irreversible poisons being dumped by officially sanctioned dredging even though in many cases they greatly exceed official “action levels”. Arsenic, mercury and PCBs are accumulating in the marine foodweb. Toxic antifoulants banned for 15 years are being dredged out and causing mass deformities to dog whelks by Hartlepool. Plasticisers, hydrocarbons and solvents are in crab tissue in every site in the UK. Dredging in Portsmouth in 2016 caused what the report calls a “decline” in crab and lobster catches, and anyone else would term a collapse — they fell by more than 70 per cent in four years.

Our seas are in crisis because we treat them as a sewer. They are dying because we are killing them. This is rank stupidity. We need more caution and research, not less. Sunak’s government must act. It has every power. It is disgracefully, deliberately failing to join the dots.
 
While experts disagree about the cause of tragic deaths of marine life along the County Durham and North Yorkshire coast. Close to where I live, around 99% of the river life has been killed in recent years in the rural River Wye. Therefore I disagree with the Times editor when he/she calls the River Tees "Britain's most polluted river". Ten of thousands of fish particularly Salmon used to be taken by anglers and fisherman from the the River Wye every year. In 2021 it was less than 200 (see report) and is believed to be lower then that now. The river is virtually dead to fish with around 99% loss of fish life. This loss of life appears to be permanent and increasing. Was it caused by industrial waste? no, it is strongly believed to be untreated human waste and agricultural waste, particularly waste from expanding mega chicken and hen farms. Despite this the expansion of chicken and hen farmers continues and the amount of human waste dumped expands. Welsh water blames more volatile weather for the increase in sewage, as the drains are unable to cope, so sewage is released untreated during storms.

Its feels a more sexy media story to focus on the former industrial wastelands of Teesside as wiping out nature, but less so in Britain's rural areas where the culprits are actually more agreed upon.

 
You exaggerate the numbers of salmon caught. In 1967 the number was 7,864 but by 2002 it was 357. However your point about pollution is well made.
 
Read on one of the Sunderland message boards after the match and someone said they saw Ben Houchen in corporate at the match stuffing his face with lobster. Then some guy pipes in of course he is going to eat lobster up here. He killed them all down there.
 
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